Stephen Schiffer; XIII*—Contextualist Solutions to Scepticism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pages 317–334, https://.

Stephen Schiffer presents a groundbreaking account of meaning and belief, and shows how it can illuminate a range of crucial problems regarding language, mind, knowledge, and ontology. He introduces the new doctrine of 'pleonastic propositions' to explain what the things we mean and believe are. He discusses the relation between semantic and psychological facts, on the one hand, and physical facts, on the other; vagueness and indeterminacy; moral truth; conditionals; and the role of propositional content in information acquisition and (...) explanation. This radical new treatment of meaning will command the attention of everyone who works on fundamental questions about language, and will attract much interest from other areas of philosophy. (shrink)

What is it for marks or sounds to have meaning, and what is it for someone to mean something in producing them? Answering these and related questions, Schiffer explores communication, speech acts, convention, and the meaning of linguistic items in this reissue of a seminal work on the foundations of meaning. A new introduction takes account of recent developments and places his theory in a broader context.

In this foundational work on the theory of linguistic and mental representation, Stephen Schiffer surveys all the leading theories of meaning and content in the philosophy of language and finds them lacking. He concludes that there can be no correct, positive philosophical theory or linguistic or mental representation and, accordingly advocates the deflationary "no-theory theory of meaning and content." Along the way he takes up functionalism, the nature of propositions and their suitability as contents, the language of thought and (...) other sententialist theories of belief, intention based semantics, and related issues in ontology. Stephen Schiffer is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Soames's new theory of "cognitive propositions" is presented and several prima facie objections are presented to it.

Stephen Schiffer has recently claimed that the currently popular “hidden‐indexical” theory of belief reports is an implausible theory of such reports. His central argument for this claim is based on what he refers to as the “meaning‐intention” problem. In this paper, I claim that the meaning‐intention problem is powerless against the hidden‐indexical theory of belief reports. I further contend that the theory is in fact a plausible theory of such reports.

Dual-Brain Psychology is a theory and its clinical applications that come out of the author's clinical observations and from the Split-brain Studies. The theory posits, based on decades of rigorous, peer-reviewed experiments and clinical reports, that, in most patients, one brain's cerebral hemisphere when stimulated by simple lateral visual field stimulation, or unilateral transcranial photobiomodulation, reveals a dramatic change in personality such that stimulating one hemisphere evokes, as a trait, a personality that is more childlike and more presently affected by (...) childhood maltreatments that are usually not presently appreciated but are the proximal cause of the patient's symptoms. The personality associated with the other hemisphere is much more mature, less affected by the traumas, and less symptomatic. The theory can be applied to in-depth psychotherapy in which the focus is on helping the troubled side to bear and process the traumas with the help of the therapist and the healthier personality. A person's symptoms can be evoked to aid the psychotherapy with hemispheric stimulation and the relationship between the dual personalities can be transformed from conflicted and sabotaging to cooperating toward overall health. Stimulating the positive hemisphere in most therapy patients rapidly relieves symptoms such as anxiety, depression, or substance cravings. Two randomized controlled trials used unilateral transcranial photobiomodulation to the positive hemisphere as a stand-alone treatment for opioid cravings and both revealed high effect sizes. The theory is supported by brain imaging and rTMS studies. It is the first psychological theory and application that comes out of and is supported by rigorous peer-reviewed experimentation. (shrink)

Pleonastic entities are entities whose existence is secured by something-from-nothing transformations, these being conceptually valid inferences that take one from a statement in which no reference is made to a thing of a certain kind to a statement—often a pleonastic equivalent of the first statement—in which there is a reference to a thing of that kind. The possibility of pleonastic entities is further explained in terms of the notion of one theory being a conservative extension of another. Propositions are pleonastic (...) entities, and the way in which they are individuated shows how pleonastic propositions are both fine-grained and unstructured. (shrink)

A generative grammar for a language L generates one or more syntactic structures for each sentence of L and interprets those structures both phonologically and semantically. A widely accepted assumption in generative linguistics dating from the mid-60s, the Generative Grammar Hypothesis , is that the ability of a speaker to understand sentences of her language requires her to have tacit knowledge of a generative grammar of it, and the task of linguistic semantics in those early days was taken to be (...) that of specifying the form that the semantic component of a generative grammar must take. Then in the 70s linguistic semantics took a curious turn. Without rejecting GGH, linguists turned away from the task of characterizing the semantic component of a generative grammar to pursue instead the Montague-inspired project of providing for natural languages the same kind of model-theoretic semantics that logicians devise for the artificial languages of formal systems of logic, and “formal semantics” continues to dominate semantics in linguistics. This essay argues that the sort of compositional meaning theory that would verify GGH would not only be quite different from the theories formal semanticists construct, but would be a more fundamental theory that supersedes those theories in that it would explain why they are true when they are true, but their truth wouldn’t explain its truth. Formal semantics has undoubtedly made important contributions to our understanding of such phenomena as anaphora and quantification, but semantics in linguistics is supposed to be the study of meaning. This means that the formal semanticist can’t be unconcerned that the kind of semantic theory for a natural language that interests her has no place in a theory of linguistic competence; for if GGH is correct, then the more fundamental semantic theory is the compositional meaning theory that is the semantic component of the internally represented generative grammar, and if that is so, then linguistic semantics has so far ignored what really ought to be its primary concern. (shrink)

Stephen Schiffer; III*—Intentionality and the Language of Thought, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 87, Issue 1, 1 June 1987, Pages 35–56, https.

To a first approximation, _propositional content_ is whatever _that-clauses_ contribute to what is ascribed in utterances of sentences such as Ralph believes _that Tony Curtis is alive_. Ralph said _that Tony Curtis is alive_. Ralph hopes _that Tony Curtis is alive_. Ralph desires _that Tony Curtis is alive_.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Sorites Paradox Some Attempts at a Solution Happy‐and Unhappy‐Face Solutions Vagueness, Indeterminacy, and Partial Belief.

This is the first monograph devoted to the theology of the Epinomis. It argues that the work offers a revised Platonic conception of the divine better suited to the political imperatives of the post-Classical age. The Epinomis is an 'appendix' to Plato's Laws written by Plato's student, Philip of Opus. Through a comprehensive analysis of the Epinomis' lexicon, and comparisons with the Corpus Platonicum, Vera Calchi offers readers an insight into the Epinomis' philosophical and historical context, purpose, and legacy. (...) Calchi argues that Philip effectively reshapes Plato's metaphysical language into a theology premised on the immanence of God in the heavens. The resulting account of God's providential activity in the cosmos, which offers a new way of thinking about morality and political order, can be regarded as a major step towards the cosmic theology of the Hellenistic period. The Theology of the Epinomis is suitable for students and scholars of ancient philosophy, particularly those working on the Epinomis and Platonic philosophy. It will also be of interest to those studying the history of religion and theology in antiquity. (shrink)

The replication crisis has spawned discussions on the meaning of replication. In fact, in order to determine whether an experiment fails to replicate, it is necessary to establish what replication is. This is, however, a difficult task, as it is possible to attribute different meanings to it. This paper offers a solution to this problem of ambiguity by engineering a concept of replication that, if compared to other proposals, stands out for being not only broadly applicable but also sufficiently specific. (...) It features a minimal level of operationalism, which would otherwise limit its applicability, while it heavily relies on replication’s specific epistemic functions, which are inter-disciplinary. Another merit is its context sensitivity, which enables it to differentiate instances of replication from non-instances of replication in every scientific discipline according to the discipline’s own standards. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on a question: how does the intentionality of language 'derive' from the original intentionality of thought. Hardly any philosopher of language would deny that if something is an expression which has meaning in a population, then that is by virtue of facts about the linguistic behavior and psychological states of members of that population. The chapter starts with a reconstruction of Lewis's account of the relation in Convention because a problem that immediately arises for that account provides (...) a natural segue to the more ambitious Intention‐Based Semantics (IBS) project. IBS is a program for reducing all questions about the intentionality of speech acts and linguistic expressions to questions about the intentionality of thought. It takes as foundational in the theory of meaning a certain notion of speaker‐meaning and seeks to define it, without recourse to any semantic notions, in terms of acting with certain audience‐directed intentions. (shrink)

Presentations of Gricean semantics, including Stephen Neale’s in “Silent Reference,” totally ignore vagueness, even though virtually every utterance is vague. I ask how Gricean semantics might be adjusted to accommodate vague speaker-meaning. My answer is that it can’t accommodate it: the Gricean program collapses in the face of vague speaker-meaning. The Gricean might, however, find some solace in knowing that every other extant meta-semantic and semantic program is in the same boat.

Let V be a finite relational vocabulary in which no symbol has arity greater than 2. Let be countable V‐structure which is homogeneous, simple and 1‐based. The first main result says that if is, in addition, primitive, then it is strongly interpretable in a random structure. The second main result, which generalizes the first, implies (without the assumption on primitivity) that if is “coordinatized” by a set with SU‐rank 1 and there is no definable (without parameters) nontrivial equivalence relation on (...) M with only finite classes, then is strongly interpretable in a random structure. (shrink)

One dimension of cognitive success concerns getting it right: having many true beliefs and no false ones. Another dimension of cognitive success concerns using the right concepts. For example, using a concept of a person that systematically excludes people of certain demographics from its extension is a sort of cognitive deficiency. This view, if correct, tasks inquirers with critically examining the concepts they are using and perhaps replacing those concepts with new and better ones. This task is often referred to (...) as “conceptual engineering”. However, so far it is unclear what exactly happens in cases of conceptual engineering. How does language change when we engineer a concept? This article offers an answer. I propose a view on which, when speakers assess the truth of propositions, they often rely on assumptions with regard to what is required for their truth. For example, when speakers assess whether unborn fetuses are people, they rely on assumptions with regard to what is required to be a person. Based on this idea, I develop a model of conceptual engineering according to which speakers “engineer concepts” when they change how they assess the truth of propositions. For example, speakers engineer the concept of a person when they change how they assess the truth of the proposition that unborn fetuses are people. (shrink)